foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Notes to Pages 128-1 40 289
opponents over Iran, including feminists, Foucault did not name any of them, in keeping
with a common practice in French intellectual discourse mentioned earlier.
13. Bani-Sadr reponed to us that Foucault quietly helped individual Iranians,
however (personal communication, December 11, 2002).
14. Internal evidence suggests that this essay was written in 1988.
15. We owe this observation to Zahra Khanlari, a member of the distinguished
Amirshahi literary family, who worked as one of Sanre's assistants during this period
(interview, July 9, 1994).
16. Because of this, we cannot agree with Macey that Foucault's views 'were in fad
little different" from those expressed by many others on the Left. Nor can we agree entirely
with Macey that it was "his visibility" rather than his actual views that made Foucault
the target of so much criticism when the Iranian Revolution quickly turned into a harsh
theocratic despotism (1993, 423).
Chapter 5
1. David Halperin suppons our view (and Foucault's) that there may be a relationship
between Middle Eastern/Mediterranean sexualities and those of ancient Greece, at least
as far as Mediterranean societies are concerned: "Contemporary Mediterranean sexual
practices continue to afford us a promising avenue of inquiry into the conventions of
classical Athenian pederasty" (1990, 61). On the reception of Said in Middle East studies,
see Lodcman (2004). It should also be noted that when Foucault discusses ancient Greece
he is frequently referring to Athens, since most of our knowledge comes from Athenian
culture.
2. Ronald Hyam argues that the colonies were a location for the "revenge of the
repressed," a place for ejaculations that European males were denied at home (1990,
58). See also Stoler 1995, 175, and Aldrich 2003. Joseph Boone has explored this issue
in greater detail and writes, "For many Western men the act of exploring, writing about,
and theorizing an eroticized Near East is coterminous with unlocking a Pandora's box of
phantasmic homoerotic desire" (1995, 93).
3. Roben Young explores this period in a different way. He points out that Foucault
wrote much of The Archaeology of Knowledge in Tunis. Young suggests that his distance fro m
France and Europe provided him "with perhaps with a more effective ethnology of the West
and its mechanisms of power. " It also made him alter his earlier views. Whereas in Madness
and Civilization, Foucault had emphasized the way in which a society labeled someone as
"the Other" to be excluded and silenced, he now came to "radically reconceptualize the
role ofthe 'other' and alterity in his work" (Young 200 1, 397-98).
4. During the 1968 student protests, Foucault, who was not yet very politically
involved, took some small adions to suppon his students as they faced long prison
sentences, resulting in his being roughed up by the police one night as he drove one of his
young Arab lovers home. Edward Said (2000b) argues that Foucault was deponed because
of homosexual relations with students, but these would likely have been tolerated had
he not been involved in supponing the student protestors. Initially, however, Foucault
was very critical of the Tunisian student movement, referring in a private letter to one of
his former professors to what he called a "pogrom," in which hundreds of Jewish-owned